The Priesthood of all Believers

Justin Brown

12:01AM BST 05 May 2007

By Justin Brown

I don’t know any place in the world as silent as the long-termers’ wing of Wandsworth prison after midnight. During the day the uproar is continuous, like a steel-factory. But with nightfall there comes a moment when the prison takes on the air of a vast, empty cathedral. One by one the radios are extinguished, the lights go out, the voices cease calling to one another from mouths pressed up against barred windows. It is the time when prisoners lie waiting for sleep to come, and for the dreams that will shape their fears or grant them their wishes for a few restless hours.

I used to listen for that moment. When it arrived I would close my eyes and breathe it in like a blind man inhaling the scent of a flower, enjoying a rare instant of self-forgetfulness before going to bed to risk my own dreams. Sometimes I might hear, like a reverent whisper, the slippered footsteps of a night-patrol auxiliary on his rounds. But after the deafening percussion of the day it was a gentle sound that seemed only to deepen the silence as it faded away down the landing. Prisoners sleep like soldiers: when they can, as much as they can.

It was gone midnight when I heard the keys outside my cell. I had stayed up late to finish reading a life of Gladstone, and when the door opened I was trying to find enough hot water at the bottom of my flask to dissolve the last few granules of Nescafe left in the jar. No one ever came to see a prisoner at this time of night, not unless they were bringing the worst kind of news. A death in the family might qualify, but mine were all dead. That made me pretty much bullet-proof in a place like this.

I recognized the tall, anxious-looking man in the doorway. He was usually hunched over a spreadsheet in the wing office, though I had never spoken to him even to learn his name. I knew his type well enough: a thirty-something fast-tracker with a degree in social administration; joined the prison service with the idea of making a difference, then woke up one morning to discover that Whitehall had turned him into a cost accountant with a mission statement and a set of monthly targets. Alan Kendrick, Head of Custody. It was printed on his shiny new lapel badge.

I’m sorry about the time, Chesser.’ He smiled nervously and fiddled with the frayed end of his tie. ‘It seems you have a couple of official visitors. I’ve arranged for you to see them in the chaplain’s office. I know it’s late, but…’ His words trailed off awkwardly. The Head of Custody was clearly not a man who spent much time fraternizing with his captives.

‘What kind of visitors, Mr. Kendrick?’ I asked him. ‘Why would anyone want to see me at this time of night? In any case I’m just about to go to bed. Couldn’t they come in the afternoon, like everyone else?’

An alarm bell was going off in my brain and I fought to keep its panic from entering my voice. Detachment had been my way of dealing with prison. From the very first day I had kept myself apart, observed the life going on around me like a radar-operator searching for blips on a screen, wary of anything out of the ordinary. Also I had an ocean of time to cross and an identical pattern to each sour day spent crossing it. I did not want the outside world sneaking in to remind me of everything I had lost.

‘I’ve laid on coffee and biscuits,’ Kendrick went on, ignoring my questions. ‘I’m sure it won’t take long. And you may have the morning off work if you’re too tired to go in. It’s Healthcare, isn’t it, where you work? I’ll leave a memo for the duty officer.’ He probably marked out his territory with memos, I thought. Scattered them all over the jail, like a cat spraying its urine.

I climbed up the iron spiral stairway to the landing above, from where the Reverend Susie Miller shepherded her multi-faith flock and doled out tea and custard-creams to her bible study group on Thursday evenings. Kendrick watched my ascent anxiously from the bottom, no doubt reassuring himself that I was sufficiently co-ordinated to undertake the feat without falling off and bringing the Health and Safety regulations down on his head. He had disappeared by the time I reached the chaplain’s office, but I guessed he wouldn’t be far away. I guessed too that my official visitors must be very official indeed if I was being left without an escort in the middle of the night.

I had never been out of my cell at this hour. It was like standing alone in one of London’s massive Victorian railway stations before dawn: empty and utterly still. In a few hours’ time a great brass bell would be rung outside the centre office. It was the signal for a thousand men to spill out on to the landings and swarm over the stairways and the breakfast hotplates, each one of them trying to be first in the queue after going sixteen hours without a meal. The screws did a lot of shouting first thing in the morning; it was always the worst time for trouble. I looked across at the deserted length of ‘C’ wing, with its tiers of landings and safety-wire rising twenty metres above the centre in row after row of tiny cells. I thought that if Brunel had been asked to design a termite colony he would have come up with something very like Wandsworth.

The two men looked momentarily taken aback by my entrance. Maybe they had been expecting me to knock. There was one of those silences you always hear when a conversation snaps shut, then the man nearest me rose quickly from his seat and stretched out his hand. He was slender and pale-complexioned, with sandy hair and a face as sharp and bright as a needle. When he spoke it was with the nasal Scottish accent I always associate with Dundee.

‘Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Chesser,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘We would have made it earlier, but in the circumstances it’s probably better if there aren’t too many people about.’